Tons of interesting stuff came from todays NetBeans shindig. I am impressed with the progress they have made in just a year. The tool set is tons better and seems to be making significant progress on the way to being a first class player. Yet another reason to be glad for Eclipse. The Eclipse team has really forced the issue to make NetBeans better. One of my favorite quotes last year from a NetBeans/Swing guy was that they didn't realize how important native look and feel was to developers (and ultimately users). Duh! They have a much better story for that now and espically on the performance side of things. It runs fast (esp on my shiny new 17" MacBook Pro:).

Ok so back to todays content.

Started with some history and stuff and a big thank you to the folks that stuck with the NB platform through some lean years. A little chest thumping too with their success. From the sounds of it they have something to be happy about too, 6 fold increase in # of active users. Which is a great growth curve. Hard to know what it was last year but still that is a good curve. They were also very keen on thanking the folks that are new to NB and willing to try it out.

Next up was the Subversion demo. Looks like very good support all the typical stuff worked as exected (checkout, checkin, chaged files, diff etc). But there was some really cool stuff to. You can cut a branch or tag from inside the GUI, which I thought was great. But hands down the best thing was the branch and merge view. So the guy doing the demo made a branch and performed a change on the branch then merged it back into the main line. The subversion integraion showed in a graphical tree view the branch history and the current trunk history and would give the ability to choose to merge down and stuff. It looked really cool indeed.

Next up was Jonathan Schwartz (BTW, is that a big announcement he is foreshadowing?). He talked about his love for developer tools which stem not from actually doing development but trying to lead a group of developers at his previous company. They were grumpy with bad tools and happy with good tools (simplification of what he said of course but not that far off). So he likes good tools. He convinced Rich Green to come back and take over software and tools. He then did a bit of mock question and answer, first question 'so are you going to opensource java'. Which I guess is a growing question in many folks minds. His basic answer was still the 'maybe' that we have been hearing for the last couple of years but there was still a lot of 'we don't want the platform to fracture'. So we will have to see what comes out this week. I wouldn't expect an open source java announcment. There was a bit more talk about how cool NB is and how much they are going to be adding to the platform over the next little bit. Sounds very interesting to me for sure, I'll have to start watching more closely. Ended with 'you will be asked to deliver more, join the JCP and help define the standars. Join the community and help define it etc.

Next up was the Sprint guys with a really cool demo of building a MIDP app in about 9 minutes that played a commercial for Sprint phones. It was very cool and easy to do. Though there was a bit of code that the demo guy had to copy and paste, I'll have to stop by their booth and see what the scoop was with that.

Next up was the google guys, Josh and Neal. They were great, the content was good but they did a great job of presenting. Basically it was a bit of info from their book and a bit of a plug for what you can do with NB and their new Jackpot integration. and finally Ben Brewin (one of the Sun NB guys) gave a quick history of where things are with NB and where they are going. Basically tons of new and cool stuff is going to be added to the community over the next 12 months or so as Sun puts all its dev tools basically into the NB community.

So that was basically it, I tried to get into the GUI builder talk but it was way overcrowded. I went to part of the JavaEE 5 talk but had to bail so I missed the rest of the sessions. Overall very interesting indeed.

I finished up NetBeans day about half way through because I had to meet up with Chris. So I didn't stay to try to win the iPod raffle... Ah well seems that a video iPod is the thing to give away this year at the conference so I'm sure I'll have another chance...

I'm sitting here tring to get into the NetBeans Day thing. I was here at 20 till and didn't want to wait in line so I went to starbucks for a coffee (assuming the line would die down), came back and the line was twice as long. Its been steady stream of people ever since. Kind of cool. Seems to be alot of energy in the NB team too, a couple of folks have walked by and been happy campers cause of the turn out. If I ever do get into the show I'll make sure to post something about the content.

I'm in SF on the ground heading out to NetBeans day. I'll post my general impressions once there. I also have some stuff to do with the JCP. Should be interesting.

I was just reviewing the session and there is as usual way too much to see but I'm going to get a change to hang out with old friends (Chris and Kevin and a couple of others) which is half the reason to come here anyway...

Well its almost that time, to hop on a plane to SFO and make the anual pilgramage to JavaOne. If you are going to be there too make sure to stop by our booth (#1520, could not find a map on online) and register for Geronimo Live.

I just recieved the Chinese translation of the J2EE AntiPatterns book. I don't understand anything on/in this book but its cool to see.

So I've built a couple of classes @ Virtuas over the last several months and I have had the chance to deliver them a few times. Some people seem to have really gotten it and others have not. After a few conversations with the other Practice Leaders I still have no idea how to make it so that everyone always gets it. Not that I really think that is possible but its a nice lofty goal. Anyway I've been thinking about how teaching my kids (we homeschool) is a lot like teaching in general. People have different learning styles and they learn in different ways. That is one of the reasons I do my classes the way I do. About half the time is spent talking and about half doing labs. But there is more to teaching a tech topic than how people learn.

There are more deminisions to the learning styles thing than you'd learn in a teaching class in college. I like to understand how things work, others like to know how to do things. What I'm wondering is what is the best way to explain something. For example in my MyFaces/JSF class I spend a lot of time the first day explaining the way JSF works and the lifecycle etc. Some people fall asleep during this (not literally, cause I throw stuff at people sleeping in my classes:) but others really dig it. The reason I like doing this is two fold. First I like to learn that way, Second I think that people who understand how something works will be better equiped to figure out how to fix problems when they come up.

Those that like to know how to do things approach the problem from a different perspective. First they want to understand how to make happen what they want to happen. They might not ever want to know how it works under the covers. You get to know how to get the job done without understanding how things work, under the covers. I have a lot of respect for this approach too. I adopt it in all kinds of ways. I generally know how a car works but I don't know or want to know the details. I generally understand how a CPU does its magic but I don't know or care about the details. I've not done assembly code in 15 years and I've forgotten everything I ever knew, and I'm OK with that.

I don't want to grok the physics/chemistry of how energy is released from gasoline to make my car move, I just want it to go when I press the accelartor. But I do want to understand the inards of my web framework or my persistence framework etc. So anyway I don't have the answer but its fun to think through this kind of stuff.